‘The Good Wife,’ Season 3, Episode 21, ‘The Penalty Box’: TV Recap

Alicia’s courtroom skills may be getting too highly developed in “The Penalty Box” episode as Cary returns to the firm; Peter veers darkly from Don Corleone to Tony Soprano and—are you kidding me?—series favorite Kalinda is set up to be killed.

Okay, that last bit is what we’re really interested in, but first the legal case: Cranky Judge Cuesta, so often a thorn in our team’s side, has been removed from all judicial duties, placed in the “penalty box” for possibly mishandling a wife killer case when he was a prosecutor 20 years ago. Who does he want to represent him? Queen Diane.

While discussing the pros and cons of Cuesta as client, Di and Will are interrupted by Howard Lyman, the wack job “senior partner” they appointed to curtail a move by Eli and crew to oust Gardner. “Who’s Alicia?” he asks as she sits there. And when Cary Agos arrives for a job interview, Howard interrupts with the all-important question: Who would you take to a desert island? When Cary answers Thurgood Marshall and Keith Richards, Howard concludes that he’s gay: “No girls. That bothered me.” (Possibly not as much as it bothers Will that Cary went after him as an ASA. “I was assigned that prosecution,” Agos defends himself. “I would not have chosen it.”)

There’s even more trouble afoot when Judge Cuesta is scheduled to arrive in the office at the same time as the firm’s drug kingpin client, Lemond Bishop. The two do not cross paths, but Bishop demands to see Kalinda and Alicia alone. Turns out he has been visited by Lana Delaney, Kalinda’s nemesis and sometime lover, which has him severely pissed off. Apparently drug dealers do not like being targeted by the FBI. “She seems to think I have some tax issues due to some work you did for me,” Lemond says as Kalinda grows pale. “I didn’t remember that you’d done work for me and I was surprised to have an FBI agent approach me at all.”

“Yeah, I’m surprised, too,” says Kalinda.

“But you don’t pay me to be your client,” Bishop points out. “I pay you. I pay you not to be surprised.”

Alicia tries to shoulder the blame, saying she didn’t tell him due to attorney-client privilege, but Lemond is having none of it: “You’re only limited in what she tells you to be limited, right?” he asks, staring at Kalinda. “Yes,” the investigator says, gulping. Lemond departs with a warning: “Listen to me. I don’t like the FBi coming to me, so take care of it fast.”

Left alone, Alicia tells Kalinda, “Your FBI friend’s going to get you killed.”

We go from that little bombshell to the comic relief of Judge Murphy Wicks (Stephen Root), the downstate hick assigned to Judge Cuesta’s case. “Just call me Murph,” he tells the lawyers.

Back at the firm, because of Will’s reluctance to hire Cary, Diane brings in another candidate: Will’s new girlfriend, recovering cocaine addict Callie Simko. Howard votes for her because of her picks for that desert island: Yo-Yo Ma (with his cello) and Brad Pitt.

But it turns out that Gardner didn’t know Callie was being interviewed, which “weird’s him out,” in her words, to the extent that he bolts from her half-clothed body.

In court, Judge Murph takes over the questioning with some hilarious lines like, “What does the prosecutor want you to say?” Cuesta’s daughter testifies that she was dating one of the jurors in the wife-killer case, but Alicia undercuts her by pointing out that she has no relationship with her father, therefore he would be unlikely to discuss evidence with her.

Segue to Kalinda pounding on Lana’s apartment door, then trying sexually to persuade her to back off Bishop. It doesn’t work. “He’s gonna kill me, Lana. Stop,” Kalinda pleads. “I can’t,” the FBI agent answers. “It’s my job.” And when Alicia later tries to deter Delaney with a legal argument, Lana gets even colder: “Tell Kalinda this isn’t over.”

Meanwhile, Eli has leaked to Peter that Cary is being considered for a job at Lockhart, Gardner. Too bad Dana’s not interested in men, because Florrick can match her in tossing pals to the wolves: Telling Agos that the one thing he values is loyalty, he fires him (is that even legal?), making us all a little nervous that Agos won’t get the new job after all.

Diane and Alicia continue to win points in Cuesta’s case as Will reveals to Diane that he’s dating Callie. “Will, I don’t’ mean to intrude,” she tells him, “but could you please keep your pants zipped????”

Eli, who has been cultivating Howard as an ally in the move to oust Will, points out that Lyman has been excluded from this little tete a tete. When the two sane partners notice this alliance, Will tells Diane to do nothing, because it will take care of itself. Which it does, when Howard decides that what they should really do is push Diane out. “Please just forget I said anything,” Eli tells him “Can we just go back to us not talking? Please?”

Some really bad testimony—the jury foreman says she saw Cuesta leaving excluded evidence in the jurors’ smoking area—leads Diane to push the judge to point his finger elsewhere, namely at his co-counsel. Lloyd was bald back then (he’s since gotten a weave) and might have been mistaken for Cuesta. But the judge refuses to implicate “an innocent man. He was with me during deliberations.”

Kalinda’s visit to Cuesta’s former investigator, who now owns a wine shop, turns up some alarming new evidence against Cuesta—the dead wife’s credit cards were used several days after her murder, when her husband, later convicted of the murder, was already in custody. And in passing, the wine shop owner tells Kalinda to get out of the investigation business while she can.

A little too late for that advice. But Diane and Alicia use that new, damaging information to force Cuesta to implicate his co-prosecutor. “Do you think there’s a hell?” the judge asks. “No,” says Diane. “I don’t either,” he agrees. “But then I meet lawyers and I change my mind.”

The firm uses Lloyd’s former addiction to painkillers to bolster their accusation, and Alicia, for the first time, engages in the kind of off-putting posturing we’ve seen in her rivals, getting all puffed up by an objection and declaring, “I’m not sure whether to be flattered or outraged by the prosecutor’s regard for our malevolence.” But the case is won when Judge Cuesta throws the blame.

Callie visits Will to tell him she isn’t taking the job, so they can continue their affair. The next day, Cary is thrilled by his new salary and Will tells him they will start with a clean slate, no hard feelings. Maybe—but Gardner gets his revenge by assigning Agos to “managerial duties,” namely managing Howard. And what does Howard want now? A “slush fund” so he can hire hookers to keep clients from leaving.

Cary asks Kalinda to join him and some other third year associates for a drink, but with other things on her mind, like getting killed, and the notion that he might have been part of the initial push, she rebuffs him.

At the bar, Alicia toasts Cary, who owes a lot to her lobbying for his rehire: “Welcome back to the Dark Side.” And here’s to Alicia, he responds, “who got a judge off today…uh, correction, got a judge out of the penalty box today.”

She confides that there are moments when she wonders WTF she is doing. He confides that in two years with the SA, he has learned nothing.

“What is there to learn?” Alicia asks.

“That people lie, and people who judge, they lie the most.” Then, bizarrely, he gets a call from Peter, which he hides. “I’m here cheating with you,” Cary says. “Excuse me.”

That leaves Alicia with an empty bar seat. And when Kalinda enters, she hesitates, then gestures for her former friend to join her.

Let’s just hope Kalinda lives long enough for them to hash through their issues and bond again.

Susan Toepfer is Entertainment/Features editor of More magazine. Read what Julianna Margulies thinks about her steamy “Good Wife” scenes here.

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